Since
the appearance of her first critically lauded book,
Asceticism
and Eroticism in the Mythology of Siva in 1973, Wendy Doniger
has been an unparalleled presence in international religious studies.
Holding two doctorates, from Harvard and Oxford, in Sanskrit and
Indian Studies, Doniger is an author, translator, and editor whose
prolific career has seen the publication of almost thirty books
in as many years. From 1978, Doniger has taught at the University
of Chicago, where she currently is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished
Service Professor of the History of Religions in the Divinity School,
the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the
Committee of Social Thought.

From her initial grounding in Sanskrit and Hindu sources, Doniger
has developed a comparative approach that now encompasses materials
as varied as ancient Greek myth, the Hebrew Bible, medieval romance,
Shakespearean drama, and Hollywood cinema. Within this vast range
of texts and forms, Doniger’s recurrent preoccupations include
dreams, multiple realities, evil, androgynes, masquerades, bedtricks,
sex, women, and animals. Provocatively juxtaposing the tales of
many different epochs and cultures, Doniger’s recent work
departs radically from the academy’s usual fixation on discrete
social and historical periods. But Doniger’s global vision
does not abandon the meticulous research that distinguished her
earliest regional work. Instead it proposes a new mode of scholarship
that is at once exactingly learned, strikingly original, exuberantly
humane, and refreshingly witty.

Characteristic of Doniger’s present perspective is
The
Implied Spider (1998), her most explicitly methodological and
theoretical work. Here she discusses myth through the metaphor of
the gaze, which can be both telescopically broad and microscopically
intimate. Myths, Doniger argues, operate at the intersection of
these polar perspectives. As telescopes, they disclose our shared
human experiences and the universal concepts that express them,
while as microscopes, they reveal the uniquely personal, even solipsistic
nature of individual lives. Their varying range of focus consequently
enables us to establish connections and conversations between disparate
cultures. Defending this project of comparative mythology, Doniger
writes:

Myth is
cross-culturally translatable, which is to say comparable, commensurable.
The simultaneous engagement of the two ends of the continuum,
the same and the different, the general and the particular, requires
a peculiar kind of double vision, and myth, among all genres is
uniquely able to maintain that vision. Myth is the most interdisciplinary
narrative.[1]

Doniger achieves
this delicate balance between the similarity and difference that
coexists among archetypal narratives by respecting the distinctive
voices of her culturally disparate texts. She always proceeds inductively,
arriving at the evidence of our common humanity only after carefully
aligning the concrete details of stories from societies otherwise
alien to each other. Her methodology “assumes certain continuities
not about overarching human universals but about particular narrative
details concerning the body, sexual desire, procreation, parenting,
pain and death, details which, though unable to avoid mediation
by culture entirely, are at least less culturally mediated
than the broader conceptual categories of the universalists.”[2]Locating
what is shared in diverse myths need not succumb, Doniger insists,
to the naïve essentialism of generalists who dangerously elide
difference. Rather, the telescopic must never be separated from
the microscopic, for only as complements are the truths of both
perspectives realized and respected.

Doniger’s
conviction that connections can be established between distant social
worlds also informs her many authoritative translations, which enable
linguistically and culturally opaque texts to be read with understanding
and pleasure by English-speaking readers. Her early works, Hindu
Myths: A Sourcebook (1975) and
The Rig Veda: An Anthology, 108 Hymns Translated from the Sanskrit
(1981), established her reputation as an outstanding translator
who renders with fidelity the original texts into lucid and elegant
English. “Her writing has a poetic élan rare
in the scholarly world. This élan does not exclude, but includes,
a lightness of tone. [Doniger] has done more than anyone to liberate
us from the heaviness and prudishness of translations from Sanskrit,”[3]
one reviewer observes. In 1991 Doniger translated from the French
Yves Bonnefoy’s compilation, Mythologies (1981).
Her version fundamentally restructures the original’s alphabetical
order, rearranging the 395 articles by geographical region and so
offers a new understanding of the way these tales are related culturally
and historically. More recently, Doniger's translation, with the
psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar, of the Kamasutra (2002) liberates
the sensual and spiritual vitality of this classic third-century
Indian text from the obfuscation and titillation of Sir Richard
Burton’s Victorian prose. In contrast to Burton's rendition,
the original Kamasutra, Doniger and Kakar reveal, exhorts
women to enjoy their sexual desires and to scold their errant husbands.
Their new translation also recovers the ancient text’s insistence
on the indispensable balance among erotic, secular, and religious
pleasures. Despite its reputation, "the real Kamasutra,"
Doniger remarks with her characteristic droll aplomb, "is not
the sort of book to read in bed while drinking heavily, let alone
holding the book with one hand in order to keep the other free.”[4]

This ability
to hear the voice of the original text and to appreciate its uniqueness
has marked Doniger’s critical and interpretive work from its
very beginning. Of her first book, Asceticism and Eroticism
in the Mythology of Siva, one reviewer wrote:

Every decade
or so a scholarly book appears that is recognized immediately
as a bench mark in its area of study, a work which, by virtue
of the novelty of its approach, of the thoroughness of its research
and analysis, will serve for many years as a guide to scholars
in charting their own courses. This study of the mythology of
Siva is, without doubt, such a book.[5]

Methodological
eclecticism is another constant in Doniger’s work, which dexterously
deploys critical strategies as various as structuralism, psychoanalysis,
philosophy, theology, and feminism. Typical is
Dreams, Illusion,
and Other Realities (1984), which explores the centrality of
dreams in the Hindu and Buddhist religions. Because “each
chapter takes up a different facet of the problem of reality and
illusion,” Doniger explains, “I use different hermeneutical
tools, both Indian and Western, at different points.”[6]

Women,
Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts (1980) bases itself on
Hindu and Sanskrit sources but also introduces Celtic and Greek
myths — signaling the comparative, cross-cultural orientation that
has shaped Doniger’s work since the late 1980s. In
Other
People’s Myths (1988), she considers myths from the Hindu,
Greek, Christian and Jewish traditions. “The ‘others’
in this book are the people who cluster on the borders of what we
define as ourselves — our Western, human, mortal, adult nature:
they are strangers (primarily in the sense of non-Westerners), animals,
gods, and children.”[7]Splitting
the Difference (1999), recipient in 2000 of the PEN Oakland
literary award for excellence in non-fiction multi-cultural literature,
examines the doubling and bifurcation of bodies — especially
female bodies — in classical Greek and Hindu myths. In
The
Bedtrick, for which she was awarded the Rose Mary Crawshay
prize from the British Academy in 2002, Doniger asks why the themes
of deception, masquerade and mistaken identity in sexual relations
are so prevalent across time and place, from ancient Hindu myths
to contemporary Hollywood cinema.

Doniger’s
prodigious output extends beyond the books mentioned here, including
as well some 240 published articles. She also has an outstanding
record of teaching and academic service and is the recipient of
numerous awards and honors. By her own admission, Doniger is an
insomniac[8],
and the spirit of someone who never sleeps and who is constantly
in motion — fitting, indeed, for one who first trained as
a dancer with George Balanchine and Martha Graham — is perhaps
the only way to account for so energetic and illustrious a career.

Her current
works in progress include a novel, Horses for Lovers, Dogs for
Husbands, and an interpretive work, The Mythology of Horses
in India. Her latest book, The Woman Who Pretended To Be
Who She Was (due to be published later this year), is about
the mythology of self-imitation in ancient India, Shakespeare, medieval
Celtic, German, and French romances, and Hollywood films. It forms
the basis for her lecture, which is entitled, “Self-Imitation
in Ancient India, Shakespeare, and Hollywood.”